Clough Doctoral Fellows visit Mexico
Thirteen Boston College doctoral students spent part of the semester break on a field visit to Mexico, through a Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy initiative that examines political geography and its impact on contemporary democracies.
During their stay from January 8-14, the BC contingent met with Mexican politicians, academics, journalists, religious, environmental activists, and nonprofit and community leaders to discuss an assortment of compelling political, social, and economic issues facing one of the world’s largest democracies. Their itinerary included stops at the Mexican Senate, a migrant shelter, the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe—the most visited pilgrimage site in the Americas—an anthropological museum, and the Chapultepec Castle.
The 13 comprise the 2023-2024 cohort of Clough Doctoral Fellows, a program that supports Ph.D. students whose research interests involve the past, present, or future of constitutional democracies worldwide. Fellows represent a diversity of disciplines in the social sciences (economics, political science, psychology, and sociology) and the humanities (classical studies, English, history, philosophy, and theology) and professional fields such as law. Their areas of research typically include state/society relations; the relationship between political economy and democracy; practices and institutions of self-government; democratic norms and values; and the role of the media, arts, humanities, and/or religious traditions in democratic societies.
Jonathan Laurence, director of the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy (Photo by Lee Pellegrini)
Each year, the Clough Center concentrates its programming around a theme, said Professor of Political Science Jonathan Laurence, the center’s director. The focus for 2023-2024, “Attachment to Place in a World of Nation-States,” considers the ongoing tension between globalization and the nation-state system over governance, law, economy, and culture, but also the other ways people define their “place”—sites of cultural, political, psychological, and/or religious significance that may resist being incorporated into the dominant world order of nation-states.
Among the questions prompted by the theme, said Laurence, are: What role do such places play within a world of nation-states? What role should they play? How do the logics of globalization and the nation-state system interact with the various forms of attachment to place that persists in our world? And which kinds of attachment to place are most significant, most valuable, and/or most destabilizing to democratic societies?
“Mexico offers so many layers of attachment for us to examine up close—including the history of indigenous groups, of Catholics and religious minorities, as well as a dynamic democratic system that is experiencing many of the same pressures we encounter here in the United States,” he said.
Along with Laurence, the fellows were accompanied by Assistant Professor of History and Clough faculty affiliate Maria de los Angeles Picone; Fernando Bizzarro, who will join the Political Science faculty this fall; and Clough Post-Doctoral Fellow Nicholas Hayes-Mota. Sharing their expertise—Picone in the intersection of nature and nation-making, Bizzarro in democratic governance—in discussions during the visit helped the students to process what they had read, seen, and heard, said Laurence.
The Clough Doctoral Fellows had plenty of experiences during the trip to prompt reflection and discussion, including an excursion to Amatlán de Quetzlcoatl, a village dating back thousands of years, long before the Spanish conquest of Mexico, populated by the indigenous people known as Nahuas. Another day included a meeting with residents from a rural community who succeeded in preventing a transnational mining project they feared would harm their environment and displace the community. They also attended a press conference given by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Ph.D. candidate Meghan McCoy, who studies late-20th-century U.S. history and the relationship between neoliberalism, reproduction, and the state, praised the Clough Doctoral Fellows program for its “emphasis on actively engaging intellectual thought with the broader world and for its commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship.”
Another Clough Doctoral Fellow, Shaun Slusarski, was struck by the group's visit to Xochicalco, a pre-Columbian city founded in the seventh century by the Olmeca-Xicalanca people. The site consisted of a series of ruins, most notably a few pyramids that played a central role in the social, spiritual, and economic life of the city.
"When we were at Xochicalco, I had a visceral sense of the spirits of the people who inhabited this awe-inspiring city," said Slusarski. "And it was not just one people at one time, but multiple peoples over centuries that imbued the place with its sacred aura. This feeling came up at many different sites that we visited. Our trip to Mexico helped to reveal how a single place, whether it's Xochicalco or the Centro Historico of Mexico City, holds multiple histories. It made me question why certain places are uniquely pregnant with meaning. Does it simply have to do with material considerations, such as a place's access to water, proximity to trade routes, or natural protection from invaders? Or are there other, more intangible reasons that places take on special significance for multiple peoples over multiple generations?"
For Picone, the trip offered a welcome opportunity to introduce Latin American culture to students unfamiliar with the region, but also to broaden her own understanding. “The Clough Center’s ‘Attachment to Place’ theme really speaks to me: I study how people came to construct different ideas of ‘the nation’ in their understandings and their experiences related to geographical space. So, I’m excited to learn more about different multiple iterations of the nation, in places ranging from a local market to a national museum.”
The group’s seminar meeting this month will be dedicated to reviewing and discussing the Mexico trip, said Laurence. The Clough Center’s spring symposium in March will be the capstone of the experience and include appearances by award-winning scholars, planners, and journalists.